Custer

by Larry McMurtry

  Though his lack of likability was a defect, he did get acquitted; witness after witness testified that he had done the best he could against huge odds: if he had gone even a quarter of a mile farther he would have been annihilated, along with all his men.

  Libbie Custer’s half century of unwavering attacks on Major Marcus Reno hurt her worse than it hurt him. She became a shrill, obsessed woman, at least in the eyes of the military men who knew something about the battle. She thought Reno was a coward, while the Indians thought all the white soldiers were cowards—many, indeed, were cut down as they fled, a contemptible thing in Indian eyes. They killed the American cavalrymen so easily; they had expected far more opposition.

  On his final expedition Custer wrote letters constantly—Libbie mentions one of forty-two pages, and, in fact, quite a few reached forty pages. Custer wrote fluently and he liked to write his wife, who was invited to many memorials and actually went to quite a few, but when someone in the War Department proposed putting up a statue of Major Reno, Libbie revolted big-time. Why honor the one coward in the battle? she wanted to know. Her very public claim that Reno was a coward was countered just as publicly by several military men, but Libbie doggedly made the same response: if Reno had fought harder her husband would still be alive.

  Libbie’s three books are Boots and Saddles, Tenting on the Plains, and Following the Guidon, the last named being by some measure the best. Libbie Custer had slowly but surely learned to write, and there is no trace in these books of the coldness Benteen complains of, though it’s possible she was colder with her husband than with the people she ran into.

  At the time of Custer’s death she was thirty-five, and a very attractive woman. Despite a kind of dude ranch tone, her books are engaging. Libbie always casts herself as the dude, whether she’s in Kansas, the Dakotas, or Texas.

  There is a volume of the Custers’ letters, edited in the 1940s by Marguerite Merrington, one of Libbie’s friends. She is quite unable to cope with the many forty-pagers and seems to me to cut too much. Fashions in frankness changed about this time. Miss Merrington trimmed much that would be perfectly acceptable as epistles between husband and wife.

  LIBBIE CUSTER, CIRCA 1895.

  Custer had many terms of endearment: my little sunbeam, my little rosebud: not, perhaps, very original, but no doubt happily received in the bleakness of a Dakota military post.

  THE EVER MATURING WORLD PRESS was ready for Custer, just as they were ready for the minor New Mexican outlaw known to the world as Billy the Kid.

  All the papers wanted to know where, when, and how George Armstrong Custer died.

  Soon the famous brewers of St. Louis chipped in with the Last Stand painting—and, perhaps just as important in spreading the dead Custer’s fame, Buffalo Bill Cody, though no pal of Custer’s, made “Custer’s Last Stand” the finale of his Wild West Show, which toured very widely both in America and Western Europe.

  Ironically, several of the Indians pretty much playing themselves in the Wild West Show had indeed been themselves at the Little Bighorn itself. Among these were Sitting Bull—in the show but not the battle, and Black Elk, who became the Oglala sage.

  Cody always firmly believed that he was showing history, not make-believe. Black Elk was about thirteen when the battle was fought—he is said to have taken a difficult scalp, a man with very short hair, hard to get ahold of.

  To present to a civilized audience some of the actual Indians who had helped kill Custer, amounting to a very early reenactment, the Indians themselves did not seem to find it particularly odd.

  The battle they flinched at reenacting was not the Little Bighorn, it was Wounded Knee. Yet Bill Cody was foolish enough to try and make a movie of Wounded Knee. It was called The Indian Wars; the Indians were afraid to act in it, thinking it might just be a new way to kill them. And when Cody brought Miles and other generals in as extras they feared even more.

  Black Elk, famously, delivered the greatest elegy to Wounded Knee:

  I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from the hill of my old age I can still see the butchered women and children, lying heaped and scattered along one or another gulch as plain as when I was there with eyes still young. And I can say that something else died here in the bloody mud and was buried here in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It had been a beautiful dream . . . now the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered . . . there is no center anymore and the sacred tree is dead.

  Many fine speeches by Native Americans echo Black Elk. The best of these can be found in a book edited by Peter Nabokov.

  The aching need to have their own culture never left these people. Geronimo, reservationed at Fort Sill with Quanah Parker, never stopped beseeching the officials to let him go back to Arizona, where he would not last an hour because so many Arizonans hated him for the killing he had done. Yet still the old man wanted to go home.

  The Indian victory at the Little Bighorn was not unique of its kind and in its time: in South Africa the Zulus overwhelmed the British garrison at Islanwanda and wiped them out to a man, and the Mahdi’s forces did the same thing to General Gordon at Khartoum. In both cases, as with Custer, overwhelming numbers beat technological superiority.

  BLACK ELK.

  But the two British defeats, unlike Custer’s, were immediately and crushingly avenged. Kitchener decimated the Mahdi’s forces; a fine account of his victory can be read in Winston Churchill’s The River War (Churchill was there).

  The poet Marianne Moore famously said that a poem should not mean, but be. What about battles. What did Waterloo really mean? or the Marne, or Stalingrad, El Alamein, Omaha Beach, and so on. Tolstoy worries the question of historical meaning in the infamous final section of War and Peace, proving very little and disappointing thousands upon thousands of readers.

  The meaning, if any, of great battles is mainly to be found in shifts in political culture. Napoleon and after him Hitler didn’t quite get to dominate the world, though narrow were the defeats.

  The Little Bighorn, as I’ve said more than once already, was really the beginning of the end for Native American culture, while at least allowing them one last surge of native pride. Long Hair casually underestimated them, and, by golly, they showed him.

  In the small town of Oberammergau, Germany, a famous Passion Play is performed every ten years. Custer’s defeat and death at the Little Bighorn, which is reenacted every year, might be understood as an American Passion Play. Buffalo Bill Cody, great showman that he was, probably knew about the German Passion Play; he was also smart enough to know that the terrible clash by the little prairie river was an event that would be endlessly replayed—and now, nearly 140 years later, it is endlessly repeated.

  Dramatically speaking, one of the things it had going for it was a powerful cast of characters. Performing for the American military were Custer, Mackenzie, Crook, Sherman, Sheridan, Miles, and Grant. For the natives we have Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall, Red Cloud, Dull Knife, Little Wolf, Spotted Tail, and others. It was always obvious who, in the long run, was going to win, making the gallantry of the losers even more appealing.

  The play may actually have profited from having an unworthy hero: Custer, for all his early brilliance, was no Lee, Grant, Patton, Eisenhower. If he makes it into the top twenty American generals it is because of the fame he gained in defeat. He had sought this final battle without really knowing what he was doing. His military training deserted him and he caused the death of over 260 men.

  Why, with so many marks against him, did he become an almost instant hero?

  I think it was because the mechanisms were then fully in place. There was the press, and, importantly, there was the telegraph: the singing wires, as the Indians called it. For the first time in human history people could get the news when it was fresh. Journalism immediately flourished, aided by this new tool. Journalism exploded; the headline was invented, fanning the flames of patriotism: how dare the Indians kill our Custer, never mi
nd that it had been his fault. The press had a field day with Custer and, in a sense, is still having it.

  Then came the camera. Finally we could actually see what our leaders looked like, and, often, our enemies as well. Cameras went, in only a few years, to being in everyone’s price range. They flooded the West as early as the 1840s, allowing people to see what previously they had only imagined. The only major Indian who eluded the camera was Crazy Horse, who refused to allow even the doctor who saved his wife’s life to photograph him. But the others were not so quick. We can see Sitting Bull’s hatred and Red Cloud’s weariness. Custer and Libbie were both photographed often. Like the pictures of politicians or sports heroes the pictures bred a kind of false intimacy.

  We rarely hear the names of these early Western photographers now, though they were quite important: Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, and Timothy O’Sullivan captured much that otherwise would have been lost. I have thirty-seven glass negatives made by a woman photographer from Henrietta, Texas. They were made at Fort Sill and include unrecorded pictures of both Geronimo and Quanah Parker.

  The Western photographers also managed to put the people in scale with the landscapes, to the amazement of Easterners.

  The process of celebrity making worked quickly in Custer’s case: all that was needed was for him to become posthumous. A big aid was the moving picture camera, which also got to the West quite early. Annie Oakley did a screen test for Mr. Edison in 1885, though vast, worldwide celebrity, of the sort enjoyed by Charlie Chaplin, probably didn’t happen until the moving picture camera was in common use.

  IN MY VISITS TO THE Custer battlefield, I found myself wondering why my fellow tourists were there. Few of them looked like history buffs. The battlefield was a major listing in the tour guides: it was just something you did if you were in that part of Montana. Great battlefields—the Marne, Omaha Beach, Stalingrad, Shiloh, Vicksburg, the Little Bighorn—are places where death once ruled, and people want to see what death left us: rows of crosses, mostly.

  MONUMENT TO WHERE CUSTER FELL.

  CUSTER’S TOMBSTONE.

  MONUMENT TO THE 7TH CAVALRY.

  We will never know what George Armstrong Custer felt when he waved to his troops and rode down that slope to meet his death. What he saw, in the short time he had to see anything, was an immense melee of horses and combatants. My guess is that the immense dust cloud so obscured the scene, or limited his focus, that he never really knew the extent of his own misjudgment. It may be that he even thought he was winning, until he was suddenly dead.

  There is no more touching comment on the slaughter at the Little Bighorn than that made by Private Thomas Coleman, the first American soldier to walk the great deathscape by the little prairie river:

  Comes the most heartrending tale of all, as I have said before General Custer with five companies went below the Valley to cut them off as he Supposed but instead he was surrounded and all of them killed to a man 14 officers and 350 Men Their bravest General of Modern times met his death with his two brothers, brother in law and nephew not 5 yards apart. Surrounded by 42 men of E Company. Oh what a slaughter how many homes made desolate by the Sad disaster everyone them was scalped and otherwise Mutiliated by the General he lay with a smile on his face.

  DIANA LYNN OSSANA

  LARRY McMURTRY is the author of thirty novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include three essay collections, five memoirs, and more than forty screenplays, including the coauthorship (with Diana Ossana) of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

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  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Adoe-photos/Art Resource, NY: p. 155.

  The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY: p. 105.

  © Bettmann/Corbis: pp. x, 60–61, 110–11, 124–25, 137, 156 top, 162.

  Buffalo Bill Historical Center/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY: title page, pp. 55, 61 top, 68–69, 120–21, 122–23, 126–27, 166.

  Buyenlarge/Archive Photos/Getty Images, pp. 53, 74 left.

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  © Corbis: pp. 8 bottom, 28–29, 33, 34, 35 top, 36 top, 49, 50, 58 top, 59, 82–83, 89, 91 middle, 92 bottom, 100, 136 top, 138 top & bottom, 144 top & bottom, 157.

  Custer Battlefield Museum: pp. 23, 30–31, 35 bottom, 82, 88.

  David Francis Barry, Negative PORT 65 A 2, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution: p. 106.

  Denver Public Library, Western History Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library: pp. 3, 25, 32, 48 right, 70, 108, 133, 136 bottom, 153, 156 bottom.

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  © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis: pp. 12–13.

  J.C. Custer Family Collection: p. 78 main picture and inset.

  Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62–42305: p. 85; LC-DIG-stereo-1s00439: p. 142.

  Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument: pp. 35 middle, 62, 141.

  © Marilyn Angel Wynn/Nativestock Pictures/Corbis: p. 87.

  Matthew Brady: The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY: p. 6; Medford Historical Society Collection/Corbis: p. 24.

  © Minnesota Historical Society/Corbis: p. 91 bottom.

  Courtesy of The Monroe County Historical Museum: p. 146.

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  Peter Newark Western Americana/The Bridgeman Art Library: p. 171 right.

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  Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY: pp. 8 top, 57, 58 bottom.

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  BIBLIOGRAPHY